...no, I'm not about to tell you I'm a reverse sleeper or an insomniac. This is going to have some of you laughing (probably maliciously).

You know the story "Madeline"? The one with Miss Clavel? Remember this line:

In the middle of one night,
Miss Clavel turned on the light,
and said 'Something is not right."

That was me at 3:30 this morning. I woke up suddenly around 3:30 in the morning and wondered why I was awake.

The light in the room looked odd, so I checked the clock and found no glowing green light from it. That's when I noticed the smoke alarm light wasn't on, the house alarm panel wasn't lit up. Then I figured out why the light was odd - it was pure moonlight into a darkened room instead of the moonlight and glow of a streetlight or two.

In prowling around the house to get my phone so that I'd have an alarm clock to wake up to, I found a couple of our emergency lights on, one not on, and the neighborhood was completely dark. Considering that I'm on the same grid as a local hospital, this did not bode well. And I couldn't get back to sleep.

There's dark, and then there's *dark*. And with *dark* comes *still*. Apparently that's the sort of dark that I can't sleep in.

This morning, around 2:30am some guy slammed into a power pole a few miles from where I live and threw most of the town I live in into darkness.

Ok, it was already dark. It sent the town into... pitch black silence. And the guy in the car hitting the power pole is no longer of this earth. Stereotype time: it was 2:30 in the morning, which is suspiciously after last call for alcohol... either the guy was drunk or fell asleep at the wheel. But I suspect drunk because it would have taken quite a bit of force to take out a power pole that left 32,000 PG&E customers in the dark.

Of course, I didn't know this at that hour of the morning because my clock radio didn't have any power. Many things ran through my head from the sublime to the ridiculous and none of them rational as to why the power was out on a calm night in springtime. If it were windy and rainy outside, I could understand that. But a nice calm night? Teach me to watch 'Jericho' before bedtime.

After about 20 minutes DH got up and went to find the emergency radio he keeps so that we could find out what's going on, and that's when A woke up. She wandered into our room and curled up into bed with us because she was unnerved by the lack of artificial light. And she wouldn't stop talking. I've finally figured it out what A's nervous tic is - she talks, nonstop. And DH turned on a music station that was playing music at 4am instead of the useful news station to hear the news.

B was the lucky one. She slept on, blissfully unaware of what was going on.

And so on it went with little catnaps of 5 minutes here or 10 minutes there until the power suddenly came back on at 4:52am. My alarm starts going off at 5am. Yes, I did stay in bed and I hit the snooze once or twice (which is pretty normal, actually). But I'm tired.

Exhausted tired. As in I might skip lunch and take a nap tired. I went to bed at 10:15, and that was a good thing else I'd be even more wiped out from all this. But at least I know I can't be asleep in a pitch black and perfectly still room because it freaked me out a little bit. I don't think I've needed to sleep in conditions like that for years...

...DH did have a point though - the stars *were* pretty while the lights were out.

---

Update:
The driver was female.
She was eluding the police after making a U-Turn and her car started weaving.
The car, a silver Honda, went in excess of 100 mph at some points.
When they pulled her out of the car, the aroma of alcohol was detected.
She died at the hospital.
The power was out for 10,000 customers.